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That Swadeshi spirit…

A casual search on the internet last month for information on a charismatic great-aunt-in-law, Prabhabati Dasgupta – who organised jute workers in Bengal for the nationwide strike in 1929 – revealed an interesting family factoid. She was apparently known in British police circles as the revolutionary sister of “known terrorist” Khagen Dasgupta.

This “terrorist”, however, far from lobbing bombs inaccurately at British officials decided instead to fight the Raj in a far cleverer way: economically. He worked his way round east Asia from Calcutta to Yokohama and then embarked on a trans-Pacific journey to California to earn himself a degree in Chemistry from Stanford University in 1910.

But a foreign degree did not mean he stayed back to hunt for a sinecure job in the US. Nor did he even consider doing the same in British India. Instead he headed back to Japan for technical knowhow on the industry he wanted to focus on – FMCG, including soap and cleaners – as India hardly produced anything back then. And he floated a company.

Ironically, less than a century after he launched Calcutta Chemicals in 1916, it is now owned by a multi-national – Henkel – thanks to the double whammy of discriminatory industrial policies of the Centre, and the suicidal militant trade unionism of Communist-ruled West Bengal. So, his quintessentially ‘Indian’ brand of soap, Margo, is now ‘foreign’.

I could understand his motivation to give Indians something as basic as their own soap as I hunted for an Indian toothpaste last week at the general store. I was under orders from my mother to do so, as she was taken by a conversation I had with a top Indian professional CEO about royalties flowing out of India as we unthinkingly use foreign brands.

“From the moment we are born to the time we die, we use foreign brands and thereby help them repatriate huge royalties back to their parent firms,” he had told me. And boy is he right: diapers, baby oil, hand sanitisers, formula, and later bottled water, noodles, fast food, cosmetics, clothes, accessories…Is there anything Indian we consciously prefer?

My mother’s love for things Indian is famous in the family, as is her way of registering protest. After she experienced apartheid first-hand when her ship docked Capetown in the 1950s, she refused to buy South African products for decades. She also foreswore Chinese food after the 1962 incursion into India. I could see what she was planning to do now…

But she will have to hold back on her foreign boycott for a while for, amazingly, there was not a single Indian toothpaste brand on offer in store after store. Desi brands are out there somewhere, but how many of them are communicating their quality to consumers effectively enough to muscle their way onto store shelves alongside behemoth MNC brands?

Quality should obviously be the touchstone for consumers, not nationality, and there must be choice. But what is stopping Indian manufacturers from taking on the foreign brands – as a certain capitalist-nationalist did with Margo – at their own game and producing world-class stuff to match up to the aspirations of global Indian?

The Union government – unsurprisingly, led by the same party that strangled CalChem’s brands back in the 1980s – is now tomtomming the messianic qualities of foreign retail chains. Sadly, despite our increasing international profile and confidence, most Indians also believe foreign branded stuff must be of better quality than what is derisively called ‘local’.

This mindset was inevitable. Poor quality bedevilled India for much of the socialist era, bolstered by government mandated monopolies. It killed the entrepreneurial spirit awakened by pioneers like Khagen Das, his Stanford classmate Suvendra Mohan Bose (founder of Bengal Waterproof, or Duckback) and other Swadeshi capitalists. So why blame us?

Except that now Indian companies are making world class produce in a multitude of sectors again. All they need are conscious Indians who will give them a level playing field – like my mother. Old CalChem papers show that ordinary Indians invested in it, 3-4 shares apiece. It demonstrated their strong belief in the ability of their compatriots. We need to rekindle that perspicacity.